Hello everyone!  Guten tag!

I'm Hannah, and I'm currently a junior studying Chemistry and Economics.  My interest in chemistry first sparked in high school with the realization that chemical reactions and molecules served as the fundamental building blocks of our physical world, the ABC’s of science.  Indeed, it is the elementary nature of chemistry that I cherish. Chemistry provides the basis for my understanding of the molecular interactions that dictate life and nature.  This field is a gold mine of discoveries that have stunning real-world applications. The application and pervasiveness of chemistry, in medicine and in consumer items, draw me to this field of research.

My current research in the Lutz laboratory focuses on applying chemistry to protein engineering and the manipulation of substrate specificity towards a variety of real-world applications that range from gene therapy to novel laundry detergent enzymes. My specific project aims to inverse the substrate stereospecificity of human deoxycytidine kinase (dCK) through computationally selected point mutations. Variants of this kinase that can selectively phosphorylate non-natural substrates could have important applications as a reporter gene in the growing and promising field of gene therapy and could be used extensively as an imaging agent in positron emission tomography (PET) imaging.  

Vital to protein engineering is an understanding of protein stability.  This topic--specifically thermal stability--is the focus of my research for this summer.  I will be spending 10 weeks conducting research in a laboratory at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany through the German DAAD-RISE summer research program.  Specifically, I will be examining the thermal stability of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies and refining high-throughput analytical methods in these assessments.

I'm SO excited to conduct research in Germany this summer, travel, make new friends, and immerse myself into European culture!  More updates to come when I get there!